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hifred

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Everything posted by hifred

  1. @BSA650 A lot of people have claimed that Afffinty looks very interesting, but that they could really do the switch until there's a DTP program. There's other users who won't be able to establish an attractive workflow, when their Graphics Suite doesn't support efficient handling and editing of RAW imagery. I actually belong to both of these groups. Unfortunately the term DAM, in contrast to term DTP-program is extremely lose. It is used for simple image viewers and sorters like Irfan View and for highly sophisticated databases for millions of images. Programs with extensive RAW editing toolsets are called DAM in the same way as tools which cater for no editing at all. All I can recall stated by Serif is that 'someone is working on a DAM', another statement was along the lines of 'yeah, we will likely add a little app to let our customers sort their assets'.That's all we know – and all I have stated that it would help, if they explained their plans some more. Serifs starting conditions should not be too shabby. Sales seem to work out well, Serif has already had a DAM in their portfolio and they already have a functional set of RAW processing tools. You guys are correct that one should not have unrealistic expectatation. I don't think I have them – and I can get my work done elsewhere. Nobody is asking for an ETA. But more info would help. If only business / workflow considerations mattered I would have become CC customer, as soon as it became available. But I have a few princple left. One of them is, that I won't spend money on content creation programs which no longer give access to your intellectual property, as soon as one lets the contract run out. Luckily I still own what I consider a very close second best option, that's Adobe's last perpetual suite. However it's more than half a decade old and it was silly not to check out possible successors. This successor could be the Affinity Suite, but it should not offer considerably less, than what I have now. I hope this so far is understandable. Realistically there's not even a good route to temporarilly switch to CC, until one possibly considers the Affinity apps mature enough to finally leave Adobe. One in these years will have created a lot of content, which other apps can not deal with at all, or only at superficial level. Understandably, after dropping a CC-subsciption, older CS6 versions will have troubles reading CC-content – given that one at all can at all re-activate the old license. Replacing a suite of programs with an array of standalone applications may turn out very powerful alternative for some users – but it usually requires quite a bit of dedication to make them work together properly. As graphics is not my main job, I want things set up a bit more comfortable.
  2. I don't know if you have ever programmed. One needs to be able to describe the overall task quite in detail before even starting –in the same way a cabinet maker needs to know all details of a planned cupboard, before even cutting the first piece of wood.
  3. I did not ask how long it will take. I want to know more about their plans, so that I can plan.
  4. I hadn't chimed in, if hadn't read the opposite stated by Serif staff, just recently: 'I'm standing next to the guy who's writing the DAM'. I can't remember where and by whom though.
  5. Photoshop has the same RAW editing capabilies as Lightroom. Since 2003. But that's not even the question here.
  6. I can understand your perspective as member of the Customer Support team and I get that these threads popping up again and again might get tiresome. That being said: It would be kind, not to underestimate the problem Adobe's change of licensing model has caused to a lot of people in the graphics industry. Speaking of myself I have already spent / wasted countless hours, checking out possible alternatives for Adobe and – thus far – can say that nothing comes even close to what I'm used to, in terms of workflow integration and performance. From a lot of posts in these forums one can gather that others are in a similar situation and that they have also spent their time to check out a variety of options. For me and for others, a decent RAW-workflow implementation was absolutely mandatory for sticking with Affintity. If you reveal in a years time that you only will create a modest Image Browser and will stick to One by One RAW Editing I had to conclude that I have again wasted a considerable amount of my time. As you guys announced Publisher there was a lot of interest too but – by far – not as many question marks. Anyone knows what a DTP program is. The definition of a DAM however, isn't clear at all. We are all paying customers – it would be tremendously helpful to aid us plan – by telling us as much as you can. This doesn't have to be you, we would also accept @Mark Ingram :o) or whoever is the person in charge. If the forum is the wrong place, then write a Newsletter: But please spill the beans.
  7. This one deviates a little from previous reports, but as one inside Affinity Photo doesn't get a visual in the image or indicated in the Layer-Editor / Status-bar info about resolution-headroom I think this is a UX flaw as well. When I place an high res image (i took a huuuge 42MP jpg) as an Image-Layer into small APhoto document I get a preview, which quite obviously shows at greatly reduced resolution on screen. As soon as the document Zoom Level exceeds 100%, one runs into pixelation. With the document open one therefore has no way to judge the true quality of the placed image. This is a crop from a huge image – but it appears in poor quality in Affinity Photo. The user gets not even a readout somewhere, which informs about its actual quality. What I found most user-friendly /wysiwyg in this situation would be screen-rendering which reveals the actual resolution of each element in a composition. Vector elements and text should render crisp at any magnification level, as it is the case in Affinity Designer + Publisher. Images with low resolution should show their limits sooner, while high res images remain crisp, even at higher zoom levels. There may be good technical reasons which do forbid hooking things up that way, but I wonder what these are... The very unfortunate effect of the current method is that one with placed images in compositions (and generally when working with text and vectors in Affinity Photo) only can evaluate the final quality level in the exported image. That seems very wrong to me, conceptually. Ironically both non image-specialized Affinity programs (AD, AP) do display placed images at full resolution (obviously text and vectors too). AD has no problems with full res images in the Pixel-Persona too... Should there really be absolutely no way around using the current screen rendering methods inside Affinity Photo (which I heavily doubt and loved getting an explanation for) the absolute least that should happen was, that one was given some clear indicators, that one is not looking at the final quality level. Photoshop, in my very old CS6 version doesn't excel in this respect either* – the placed image appears at low resolution too. But one can doubleclick the image (Smart Object) in the Layer stack, to open it at full resolution in a new tab. That way one can at least make sure, that one is working on the correct file. Xara always displays the resolution at the current scale in the document, which also helps. Interactive display of placed content's resolution in Xara's Layer stack *that may have changed in the meantime
  8. And yet another one in (APhoto) Fill Layers ➜ see also here Create a Fill Layer, fill with any solid colour Select the Fill Layer Pick the Brush Tool and start painting, to create a mask Now try to change the colour of the Fill Layer The operation fails, as Aphoto, with the Brush tool active assumes that one wants to change the colour of the brush. Users at that point will very likely believe that the fill layer had gotten rasterized and that one no longer can interactively change its colour. Indeed the Fill Layer remained intact – one 'only' needs to change the active tool to any other tool which doesn't paint and therefore has no colourpicker hooked up. What's bad about this? You leave it up to the user to unnecessary deeply analyze the work scenario and to deliberately establish matching conditions for the Fill Layer colour-change to work. Photoshop demonstrates how such situations may get avoided, by Design. To change the colour of the Fill Layer the user has to explicidly address a colour swatch inside the Fill-Layer. This may happen with any tool active. The user disambiguates, without having to think – how nice.
  9. @MEB all, could someone from staff please confirm the following bug? Alt-Clicking a masked Fill-Layer doesn't show the typical greyscale-representation of masks.
  10. @Mark IngramThe actual reason also here (in Designer) is very likely an accidental tool-change by pressing the B-key twice. I suggest implementing the Shift-protection for accidental tool change suite wide. Further, I think you should consider inverting the default behaviour – one should have to check a box if one dislikes having to press Shift. I doubt that you will find a lot of users who will freak out. The OP didn't even want to use the tool cycle mechanism – obviously she wasn't even aware of that option: Patricia only wanted to pick a tool – the fact that it was already active before her tea break made the operation fail. Please have someone analyze such error patterns. One only needs to read this forum regularly and runs into them, pretty much on a daily basis.
  11. Thank you very much @>|< This explains a lot – but how on earth are we supposed to memorize all these workflow-oddities? Also the author of the linked video clip had misunderstood, that Fill-Layers do actually remain editable... I have to admit that I'm heavily used to Photoshop – but doing the same things here doesn't contain a single step which makes me think. Photoshops implementation which requires the User to click the Fill Layer-Swatch to me seems to be a clearly superior and more robust solution: This action may get performed with whatever tool active – also with the Brush-tool. As one targets the Fill-Layer it's unambiguous what tool we want to change the colour for – at the same time an unnecessary – user performed – change of tools is cleverly avoided. It is really such little things which are tremendously important. Affinity apps are still full of steps which could get avoided when workflows were layed out smarter. I still have not understood why in Affinity Photo Alt-clicking the Fill-Layer doesn't show a black and white mask.
  12. Yeah, that should not be the case, as no rasterization is required for masking (at least one can mask image-layers without having to rasterize them). Also the Alt-Mask-Preview of Fill-Layers looks like a bug to me. I see no reason to deviate from the rule here.
  13. When adding a fill layer in an empty document one can see the Alt-Click-behaviour I described earlier. One actually gets a Mask preview, but as the Fill colour remains visible it does not look as expected.
  14. Confirmed. Confirmed, but expected. I see the the strokes I painted black in white colour (remember-Alt-Click mask view)
  15. Fill layers seem to have have the same sort of embedded mask behaviour as Adjustment layers, correct? This sure may be very irritating when used to other programs. They, in contrast to adjustment layers seem to lack the option to Alt-Click to make their mask visible for direct editing. I'm using the latest Win Beta. Can you confirm this?
  16. On the previously discussed issue, whether Affinity Photo is actively marketed as a replacement for Photoshop, just one more observation: I have to admit that I did not book Youtube ads yet – but I did so in a variety of other social channels. Here one can usually narrow down very closely the desired audience and also bid for relevant search keywords. As a Youtube user and as a person who still uses Photoshop for all his image-editing I search pretty regularly for terms like 'Photoshop + problem I want to solve'. I can not recall searching for Affinity videos. Interestingly I'm getting lots of Youtube ads for Affinity-Photo shown. This, judging from my background in other ad channels should only happen, when one actively bids for the the search-term 'Photoshop'. So, while one might avoid some explicid wording, I think it's fair to say that Serifs marketing department quite aggressively targets Photoshop-users. They were idiots if they didn't :o)
  17. This is not a valid argument as the chosen price point was entirely up to Serif. I would pay as much for the Affinity Suite as I paid for the small Adobe Design Standard Suite (even without getting Acrobat), if it offered equal value. My sole reason for looking into alternatives for Adobe apps - which I enjoy using - is that I find renting content creation software unacceptable.
  18. Thanks for letting me know Gabriel. External editing of embedded docs would also be extremely useful for those, who prefer using 3rd party tools to edit their RAW files. One would win a lot when Affinity Photo displayed processed RAWs as embedded documents, for compositing with other content and let us jump to 3rd party tools for further tweaking. In the same way I hope you guys implement re-editing RAWs inside the upcoming Serif-DAM...
  19. Here's one more – this has not to do with inapropriate tool states causing irritation – but a lot with getting trapped. Affinity Photo lets us embed external images and layered documents, which are not rasterized and therefore may get losslessly transformed. As a consequence the layer isn't directly editable with tools which require rasterized data. Understandable as well. What is not understandable and what again makes perfect traps for anyone who knows similar features from other applications is that one on embedded content... cannot create raster copies from selections may not apply sort of pixel based manipulations/corrections on layers above (stamp, heal, blur...) Right now all these operations just fail and the program gives zero feedback why this happens. Altogether these make for dozens of possible situations where nothing happens on screen and users – especially those coming from Photoshop – have no idea what the heck could be wrong. The very first step in the right direction would be that you showed an info that you that the source layer needs to be rasterized. The actual solution was to avoid such situations altogether. Other programs perform instant rasterization for the required operations, so that one may retain the encapsulated object as is and still manipulate it at will – on layers above. This auto-rasterization has only advantages over what Affinity Photo does currently. What certainly is not helpful at all is to rasterize the external content via (default) assistant – without even asking. But that's actually happening. Is there btw. already a way to send embedded documents to external applications for further editing? I have not found how to do this. I also updated embedded documents with 3rd party apps but Affinity Photo neither auto-refreshed the embedded file (seemingly no no embed + link functionality) nor lets me perform the update manually. Have I overlooked anything?
  20. I'm not sure that I understand you properly – but a standalone DAM will certainly be of good value for AD and AP-users too.
  21. This has been discussed before, earlier in this thread. A few users would prefer an inbuilt option, but Serif already stated that the DAM will be a standalone product. To me this makes a lot of sense.
  22. Well, this is a matter of definition. I only wrote about malfunctions in existing features. I consider standard-tools which bring users to a point that they can no more track down the issue themselfes defective – as the present tool-behaviour does not offer the slightest advantage, in any context.
  23. The more I tinker with Affinity Photo, the more I run into bad, but quite easy to fix traps. Some of them are caused simply by the fact that a tool behaviour remains stuck the inappropriate positions, so that they block editing in later stages of the project. Here's two: 1) Recently I found out that selection-tools stubbornly remain stuck to their previous Subtractive state even if the user wants to create a fresh selection. The operation fails, although the user has picked the appropriate tool and also has performed the expected motion. Here one badly needed an exception to the rule – selection tools have to create a selection if the tool can not find anything to subtract from. Others suggested that Affinity should beep or show a dialog and by that inform + CTA the user that the tool is in the wrong state – but that would be horrible UX. At that point you could also abolish your assistants too. Don't make me think, don't ask for pointless decisions and action if there's exactly one expected behaviour: Making a (fresh) selection. 2) Today I saw another thing which is even a lot nastier as there's not even a suble visible indicator. One may hide selections (hide the marching ants), which is great. But that hidden state even remains active when the user wants to create a new selection. Such really may not happen. There's absolutly no workflow imaginable where this made sense, this is just a trap and nothing else. A hard to understand trap – imagine you had a selection hidden and go to lunch, afterwards you pick a selection tool and run into what's shown in the GIF. Selection tools always have to revert to state=visible whenever a selection is dropped. Is there anyone in charge, exclusively for little usability-killers of that kind? It would well be worth it.
  24. Is it possible in Affinity to call a tool with a particular setting with its own hotkey?
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